


I’ve heard in all in the hospital

by glasscaskets



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Angst, Awesome Sam Wilson, Awkwardness, Children's Hospital AU, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Major Illnesses (in the background), OCs - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Wilson Birthday Bang 2019, Sam Wilson is a Gift, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Tony Stark distantly facilitating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-08 13:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20836499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: Steve Rogers becomes Captain America in 1943, and crashes his plane into the Arctic in 1945. When he wakes up in 2012, there isn't much place in the world for a super-soldier, so he finds himself doing mostly charity and outreach work, especially at children's hospitals. While working in D.C., he meets a kind, insightful hospital chaplain named Sam Wilson.Written for the Sam Wilson Birthday Bang 2019!!! Featuring incredible art of OriginalCeenote.





	1. Banner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OriginalCeenote](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalCeenote/gifts).

> Howdy, all! Written for the Sam Wilson Birthday Bang!!! Love y'all!!
> 
> I apologize all the medical fuzziness; I was being vague to avoid medical errors.

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/183133495@N02/48818838168/in/dateposted-public/)


	2. I've heard it all in the hospital

Ironically, he used to always complain about waking up early. He used to tell Bucky: “One day, I’m not gonna hafta wake up at the crack of dawn.” He hated it. He was a known grouch in the morning; an acknowledged not-a-morning-person. He needed three times the coffee most people did, and probably another cup after that if he wanted to be at his best. At some point, Dugan started calling his morning coffee intake “the bucket,” and the name stuck. Steve had been fond of saying the Italians’ greatest contribution to the Allied cause was espresso. 

These days, though, he woke up as early as he could, even when he had nowhere to go.

He woke up, usually, at dawn, 5:45 or 6 in the morning, and got dressed quickly, as if he needed to be somewhere. He made coffee blindly, in his darkened kitchen, and drank his first cup as soon as it was ready, right over the sink. If he burnt his tongue, he rarely noticed.

Every morning, he went running, usually out the door well before 6, and ran hard, ran, often, without form and without pacing himself, as if he were truly being chased. He ran until his legs burned, until he could truly believe he’d managed to reinvigorate his own asthma, until his vision blurred. Then he’d stagger home, feeling empty and separate from himself, shower, and look at his emails, which generally fell into two categories: people selling him things (which he’d learned to ignore), and work (which came far less frequently). On the good days, the days when he had emails from work, he’d get dressed up in one of the cheap, rubbery facsimile uniforms he’d been given for this purpose, grab his shield (the real one - he’d been very stubborn about that), and head to the hospital. 

(On days without an email, he often ran even more, or else spent hours squinting at the computer until the text on screen became a cascading blur of little bugs that swarmed around in his eyes, or else took long showers that turned miserably cold, but left him feeling awake enough to read in the evening.)

Today, thank goodness, there was an email - actually, two. One from Maria Hill and one from Natasha. 

Maria Hill was the person who sent Steve by far the most emails besides people selling things; of his not-people-selling-things emails, she was responsible for probably 90%. It was Maria who told him what hospitals he was going to and when, who told him in advance if there was anything he should know, special precautions or rules, but often he could ignore them, which was nice. Last month, he’d flown across the country and gone to see a little girl whose immune system was so severely compromised she had to stay in a special room, and nobody could come see her without suiting up in masks and gloves and giant hospital gowns. Steve, whose body had processed and conquered smallpox in under two hours in a controlled laboratory environment in 1943, had been able to hold her hand with his own. That was nice.

(Less nice: apparently, Maria and her bosses didn’t know about said smallpox test in 1943, which was how Steve discovered that most of what he and Howard Stark had done to study the effects and parameters of the serum were not set to be declassified until the 2030s, and also how he ended up on the phone with Tony Stark, who looked like Howard but shorter and spikier and talked twice as fast, and who demanded to know if his father had, in fact, injected Steve with smallpox to see what would happen. When Steve said yes, he had, Tony had said, “That sounds right,” and instructed Maria and Steve’s SHIELD-assigned public relations manager, Nick, to let Steve hang out with the little girl, whom he’d inexplicably called “the boy in the bubble.” When Steve thanked him, Tony Stark had replied simply, “No need to thank me, Cap, I’m very important,” and hung up the phone.)

Today, Maria’s email was less exciting, but nonetheless made a little bubble of happiness pop in Steve’s chest: he was staying in D.C., but headed to the children’s hospital there to spend some time in the pediatric oncology and intensive care wards. The email, in Maria’s typically clipped tones, ended with I hope you don’t mind dogs.

Steve didn’t know what dogs had to do with it all, but he typed his affirmative reply to Maria in a hurry and set out to find something to eat before he left. He loved having a plan for the day, and even more so, he loved going to the hospitals. Since he’d woken up in a replica hospital room, listening to a looped recording of a ballgame he’d attended with all Bucky’s birthday money, he’d found it very difficult to talk to people. It wasn’t that he was awkward - he’d always been awkward - but that he felt he couldn’t possibly have anything relevant to say. Everyone was speaking a language he didn’t know, and his toddler-like sentences in this second language (actually, his fourth, if you counted the French and Italian he’d picked up during the war, but never mind) were stunted and failed to express much. He felt like he’d been robbed of his adjectives.

Kids, though, didn’t really seem to notice. Children were still learning, too, and they didn’t ever seem to wonder how he could exist without history. They didn’t care that he didn’t know what the Berlin Wall was or who Steve Jobs was or what a disco ball looked like - they were offended he’d never heard of Doc McStuffins, sometimes, but were very willing to show him what it was.

Steve smiled to himself as he made his eggs, thinking of the little boy who had expressed pained outrage, on his behalf, that “nobody told him about Elmo,” and had proceeded to introduce Steve to the wide world of Sesame Street, including his own four different stuffed Elmo toys, one of whom wore a Captain America uniform. Steve liked Grover best.

He closed Maria’s email and turned to the other one, which was from Natasha Romanoff. Natasha was a surgeon at the children’s hospital Steve visited most frequently - where he’d been introduced to Doc McStuffins and Sesame Street, and where he would be going that day - and Steve couldn’t remember quite what she did. They’d only talked a handful of times, but she seemed to like him. He couldn’t think why.

She was nice enough, though. And as somebody who wasn’t paid to talk to him, it was nice of her to send him an email.

Hey Steve,  
Did I see you running around the mall this morning, or is there someone else who can run about a mile a minute?  
Have lunch with me today? Well, a late lunch. I’m free at 2pm. See you then. :)   
Natasha

Steve mulled this email over for a moment, wondering what it meant. It could, he supposed, just be an overture of friendship, but Natasha didn’t seem like the type to do anything that wasn’t at least partially calculated. He didn’t know much about her, beyond her profession and that she was, apparently, less passingly connected to the great Tony Stark than he was. Evidently, they’d worked together at some point.

This could be her seeing if he’d take some kind of bait, seeing how much being Captain America mattered to him. The answer was that it didn’t, much, these days. He closed the email and told himself he’d reply later. He was never quite clear on the etiquette of these things - he knew a text message was, essentially, a phone call, and you replied as soon as you could, but an email, especially in a world with text messages and phone calls, seemed to leave more time to respond, though he didn’t know where the line was in terms of politeness. Probably he could take at least half a day, though, and if that turned out to be frowned upon, he had the wonderful excuse of being an old man who only looked twenty-six.

Well, so he’d wing it. He dashed off a reply: Dear Natasha, I’d be happy to have lunch with you. Just let me know where to meet you. Best, Steve 

With a smile to himself, he closed his computer, stood up, and went to go turn in to Captain America.

-

As it turned out, the reason Maria had wanted to know if he was okay with dogs was because there was one at the hospital that day – a giant, bounding, extremely enthusiastic Vizla named, apparently, Redwing. Steve gathered the dog’s name from the delighted chorus of kids calling to it when it showed up in the rec room, and Steve – who used to get in trouble for giving table scraps to the stray dogs that howled in the alley behind his apartment building – was delighted, until Redwing, who was exceptionally gentle with the young children, absolutely bowled him over, leaving him sprawled on the floor. The children had all roared with laughter, and Steve chose to let them believe it was something he’d planned.

(It wasn’t. The big-ass dog actually just sent him flying.) 

Later, he was cheerfully informed that the entire thing was on YouTube, already. The harbinger of this news was a 13-year-old patient named Jamie.

“I think that dog would weigh more than you, if you were here before your serum,” said Jamie, clearly delighting in the entire thing, as he restarted the video for somewhere between the tenth and nine hundred and fortieth time. 

Steve liked Jamie, a lot. He was a skinny and short for his age and, of course, grimly accustomed to being sick– he’d been fighting bone cancer most of his life, and lost his left arm to it – but despite these glancing similarities to Steve’s childhood, it was really Bucky who he thought about when he talked to Jamie. The kid had Steve’s – or, at any rate, the old Steve’s – same clenched-jaw determination and weary acceptance about his “reasonably crappy lot in life,” as he’d put it himself, but everything else about him just reminded Steve so much, and so surprisingly pleasantly, of Bucky. It wasn’t just that the way Jamie got gleeful about dumb science fiction, or the way he flicked his head to get his long, thinning hair out of his eyes (of course, in those days, Bucky’s hair had never been so long; Jamie kept it long, he told Steve, because he’d hated being bald so much during his earlier rounds of chemo) – it was something about his humor, the easy way he teased Steve but also the way Steve constantly saw him looking after the younger, smaller, and sicker kids. It was his natural peacemaking, his bone-dry humor, the way he never, ever admitted to anybody that he was scared. It hurt Steve’s heart, of course – like everything that reminded him of Bucky – but unlike so many things that made him think of his friend, seeing Jamie, and seeing Bucky in Jamie, didn’t make Steve’s chest ache. It didn’t make his head feel too heavy, make him wish he could take a step outside of himself, make him wish he didn’t have to be anywhere where he’d be reminded that Bucky used to be there and now he wasn’t. That he was alone in the world, without Bucky Barnes, for the first time in his entire life.

Jamie, though, didn’t really hurt his heart that way. The pangs of mourning and twinges of nostalgia were easily overshadowed by the fondness he felt for the kid, the joy he took in making him laugh.

Which he was certainly succeeding at doing. In fifteen months since waking up, Steve had yet to fully grasp the point or function of Twitter, but according to Jamie, it was invented solely so the world could share in this moment. And the world was, or so it seemed, as Jamie had spent the last ten minutes gleefully reading Steve the best of Twitter’s reactions while he leaned back in his plastic, faux-plush chair, receiving his chemotherapy. 

“‘Tell me how Captain America was able to yeet a German tank like it was tinfoil but a dog has him KO’d,’” Jamie read, and Steve estimated he understood about 60% of what was just said to him. “‘I thought I was going to do work today, but apparently I’m going to watch a dog knock Captain America on his ass on loop until I die.’ Aw, these are great, but I hate the ‘heckin’ good pupper’ stuff, so cringey, y’know?”

Steve, who didn’t know and in fact could scarcely have been further from knowing, nodded gamely. He’d never seen anyone – and his experience was limited, but not that limited – maintain this much energy while undergoing chemotherapy.

“I like this one, though,” Jamie continued. “‘I’d like to formally announce that the dog that knocked over hashtag Captain America is the MOST good boy.’ Aw, and a bunch of animal shelters are using it to try and make people adopt more dogs.”

“Seriously?” said Steve, looking at Jamie’s phone screen for the first time. “How? It’s only been an hour!”

“That’s like forty years in internet time, dude,” Jamie said, grinning maniacally, then he called over Steve’s shoulder: “Hey, yo, Sam! Your dog is famous!”

Steve looked up from Jamie’s phone (and his own crossword puzzle) to see - 

Well, actually, the most handsome guy he’d ever seen in real life. Woah.

Sam, he of the now-famous Captain America-tackling dog, was nearly as tall as Steve, but not as broad - almost no one was - he had a slender, runner’s quality about him. His eyes were bright, his face punctuated with high cheekbones, and when he smiled at Jamie (and Steve - oh, god, and Steve), he had a little gap between his teeth.

Oh, shit.

Sam was making his way over, and Steve noted - belatedly - that he also had a dog on a leash by his side, the now-famous Redwing, who was panting merrily and wagging his tail. As he got closer, Steve could see that his sweater read Air National Guard.

“Hey, Jamie,” said Sam, reaching out his hand to engage Jamie in some kind of complex handshake they’d clearly perfected in the past. He was instantly relaxed and friendly, a master in the art of pretending there was nothing out of the ordinary about a teenaged boy being pinned to a chair by the apparatus of his chemotherapy infusions. Which, for Jamie - and for Sam, and even Steve - there wasn’t, but people often struggled to act that way. Steve had known that long before he met Jamie. “How’s it hangin’, man?” Sam asked.

“Pretty good,” Jamie said, grinning widely, “better now I’ve got to explain to Cap here what ‘yeet’ means.” 

“To be clear,” Steve sighed, “I still have absolutely no idea.” 

Jamie was cackling, and a nurse - her name was Sharon, Steve was pretty sure - came over and told Sam and Steve quietly that they had to leave the ward now. Jamie groaned but acquiesced, and Steve and Sam both bade him goodbye and promised to visit soon.

Once they were off the ward, standing in the wide hallway by the elevator, Redwing’s patience ran out and he began headbutting Steve’s legs furiously, apparently hoping for attention. Steve scratched behind his ears obligingly.

Sam smiled at him now. “Sorry my dog took you out,” he said, looking not at all sorry, “and even sorrier I already heard about it. Specifically, on Twitter.”

He stuck out his hand, and Steve shook it. It was soft, which Steve wasn’t even trying to notice. It was noticeably, and possibly unignorably, soft.

“No worries,” said Steve, and they dropped each other’s hands. Steve found himself wondering if his hands were soft, and doubting it. And doubting that Sam had noticed. But wondering, nonetheless. “What unit were you with?” he asked, gesturing to Sam’s sweatshirt.

“58, Pararescue,” Sam replied, with an immediacy Steve recognized - it was how he’d answer the question, how Bucky or Gabe or Dugan would answer the question, how his dad would answer the question. Not always proud, not always stubborn, but as instantaneous as your name. “But now I’m working down at the VA, and of course here,” Sam continued. “I’m the chaplain here.” He stuck out his hand. “Sam Wilson.”

“Steve Rogers,” Steve replied, his brain instantly supplying a long list of pastoral visits to the sick or bereaved Rogers family through the years. Sam didn’t seem like any of those priests, of course.

“I kind of put that together,” Sam said, gesturing broadly to Steve’s lycra faux uniform and his shield. “Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing.” 

Something that had been moving inside Steve’s chest went still; some light went out. The room seemed to lose a bit of color. (Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental disorder that can develop after a person is exposed to a traumatic event, including warfare and combat, vehicular or airplane crashes, or threats to one’s life.)

“It takes some getting used to,” he heard himself say, his voice oddly clipped and strained even to his own ears. He suddenly, in a complete and stomach-wrenching reversal, wanted very badly to get away from this conversation. (Symptoms may include disturbing thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to the events, mental or physical distress to trauma-related cues, attempts to avoid trauma-related cues, alterations to how a person thinks or feels, and an increase in the fight-or-flight response.) “It’s good to meet you, Sam,” he added, and turned to go.

“It’s your bed, right?”

Steve turned back around and looked at Sam properly. His own voice still sounded a little far away, over the sounds of his blood in his ears. (In roughly 25% of veterans in whom PTSD is present, its onset is delayed by at least - )

“What’s that?”

“Your bed. It’s too soft. When I was over there, I’d sleep on the ground, I’d use rocks for pillows, like a caveman. That’s a Jamie-ism, by the way, like a caveman. Now I’m back, and I’m lying on my bed, and it’s like…”

He paused, frowned, as if worried he was losing Steve. He wasn’t. Instead, Steve felt like some kind of heavy magnet had lodged itself in his belly, and it was turning, orienting itself towards Sam and Steve along with it.

“Like lying on a marshmallow,” Steve said. (Sleep is often a core focus for both diagnosis and management of PTSD, with 70% of PTSD patients reporting insomnia or sleep disturbances.) “Feel like I’m gonna sink right into the floor.”

Sam smiled, a smile full of knowing and of strange, urgent warmth - maybe recognition, Steve thought, was what that was.

“How long?” Steve asked, and even as he said it he wasn’t sure what he was asking - how long were you gone, how long have you been back, how long does it feel like my bed and my kitchen chairs and my seat on the train are going to swallow me - but he wanted to hear Sam’s reply. This was in and of itself a little surprising, he thought, distantly - he didn’t much like to invite conversation about all of this, as those discussions he had been corralled into having had been, in a word, horrible. 

“Two tours,” Sam said, pulling Steve back from his reverie. “You must miss the good old days, huh?”

(People react to experience of trauma in a variety of ways, such as sadness, irritability and confusion. In the immediate aftermath of a major traumatic event most people complain of stress, difficulty concentrating, sleeping or getting along with others. With PTSD, the troubling symptoms worsen, affect social and work functioning, and persist longer than a - )

“Well,” he said, shrugging, feeling some shafts of light cut through the swirling, dusty darkness in his chest, like a window had been thrown open, “things aren’t so bad.” Men have boyfriends, these days, he considered saying. “Food’s a lot better, we used to boil everything. No polio is good.” 

He wondered if he should mention that, in addition to smallpox, Howard Stark had once attempted to infect him with polio. He decided not to.

“Internet,” he continued, “so helpful. I’ve been reading a lot, trying to catch up.” 

Sam smiled, licked his lips, and frowned up at the ceiling. “Okay,” he said, “Marvin Gaye, 1972, Trouble Man soundtrack. Everything you’ve missed jammed into one album.” 

Steve felt himself smiling. “I’ll put it on the list,” he said. 

He pulled out his little notepad and scrawled down Trouble Man, below I Love Lucy, moon landing, Berlin Wall (up + down), Grover, Sesame Street, ER (television show), Doc McStuffins, Thai food, Star Wars/Trek, and Muppets In Space. 

He looked back up, eager to hear Sam’s thoughts on his list, but his phone chimed, and he glanced at it before he could stop himself.

Meet me in the caf? :) -Natasha 

“Alright, Sam,” said Steve, and hoped it wasn’t weird that his voice sounded resigned. “Duty calls.”

“I’ll catch you around,” Sam replied, easily, and then Steve stepped into the elevator and headed down to the cafeteria. “Swing by the VA sometime.” 

Natasha was waiting at the entryway, and she greeted him warmly but without smiling. “Captain Rogers,” she said.

“Hi, Dr. Romanoff,” he replied, and that got a smile out of her.

As they waited in the line for that day’s offering - profoundly depressing-looking pizza - Nat turned to him and smirked. “Did you do anything fun Saturday night?” she asked.

The question was so entirely unexpected that for a moment, Steve thought he must have heard her wrong. After he caught her mischievous smile, though, he swallowed and realized she was messing with him. It had been so long since anyone - or, really, any adult - had spoken to him, the famous and important, Captain America, with anything other than solemnity that he felt himself thrill at her mischievous little smile.

“Well,” he said, drawing the syllable out as he collected napkins, “all the guys from my barbershop quartet are dead, so. No, not really.”

She snorted, clearly not remotely expecting him to reply with such candor or bite, and he felt a moment of muted triumph: Steve from Brooklyn can still give as good as he gets.

“So,” said Natasha, as they sat down over hospital cafeteria food, “this is a far cry from your training, isn’t it?”

Steve looked at her over his coffee and melting-cardboard pizza. Of all the things he’d expected her to say, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t necessarily expected her to say anything, but definitely not that.

“Well,” he said, patting his pizza with a napkin to buy time, “my training was pretty specialized. And to address a pretty specific problem.”

Which was a very polite way to talk about rogue freak Nazis doing human experiments, but Steve had learned that people preferred it when you put things in a polite way. Or, rather, he’d always known, hut since waking up in a new century he’d finally developed a desire to put things politely himself. 

“I suppose so,” said Natasha, giving him a look he couldn’t read, but which felt mildly appraising. “That said,” she added, “I’d imagine much of that expertise is pretty transferable.” 

Steve raised his eyebrows; he couldn’t think what she meant. She saw his confusion and set down her fork, then picked up her napkin to dab her lips, even though they were perfectly clean.

“I have some friends in high places,” she said, lightly, “who are interested in you, and what you can do.”

(“Captain Rogers, are you trying to tell me that Mr. Stark, with the consent of your commanding officer, deliberately injected you with infectious agents? This was with your permission?”)

(“Steve—you—your hand—went...through that guy.”)

“How—how do you mean?” Steve asked. 

Nat placed a small card on the table, a business card, facedown, and slid it across the table toward him with two impeccably manicured fingers. 

“The short version,” she said as casually as if they were discussing the weather, “is that your skillset lends itself to some work more than others.” She looked around the hospital, gesturing embracingly. “The question is, does your temperament?”

Steve took the business card off the table and didn’t look down at it yet. He was watching her face very closely, trying to read her, to see if she was asking or directing, requesting or threatening, suggesting or ordering. People like her - people with friends in those high places, not to mention the friends themselves - so rarely said what they meant.   
He tapped the card once against the table and told Natasha, “I guess we’ll have to see.” 

She gathered her napkins on her plate, clearly readying to leave. “I guess we will.”

After she’d left, Steve turned the card over and read it: Nicolas Fury | S.H.I.E.L.D. | Serious inquiries only, and a phone number. He sucked his teeth; he knew what Natasha - and this Nicolas Fury person - was asking of him, or at least he was quite confident he knew. Nat’s talk of his skillset, of transferable expertise and friends in high places, wasn’t that hard to decipher, if you knew what you were looking for. Or if you’d been waiting - maybe without even realizing it - for exactly such a talk. 

Because for all he’d become an American Icon in the intervening decades, Steve’s career had begun in special ops.

He put the card in his pocket and felt it flat against his phone. He wished he’d gotten Sam Wilson’s number.

That evening, sitting on the couch with a box of cereal for dinner - and he knew there was a lot wrong with that, but he was very hungry (he required, Howard had noted, three times the caloric intake of a normal adult man to feel full) and didn’t want to cook. He also didn’t have the ingredients to cook, and was terrible at cooking. 

So, cereal.

He was thinking about a lot. He was thinking about the card from Natasha, about if he should respond to Nicolas Fury’s call for serious inquiries only.

He knew - he wasn’t an idiot - he knew a lot of people wanted him to do things other than go to children’s hospitals and occasionally show up at museums and town halls. He knew he was more profitable than that. Be it medical research, wetwork, acting as an ornate mouthpiece for some government office or corporate conglomeration - there were a lot of ways to make money off of him, and a lot of people who to do it.

The kind of skills Natasha had been hinting at, at least, were a good deal more appealling than the rest. He really did specialize in - excel at, even - those tasks more odious, delicate, or unlawful than could be asked of a regular soldier. It was how he’d spent the war. It was how Howard had spent the war, too, and Bucky, and Gabe, Dugan, Falsworth, Jacques, Jim. It was how Peggy spend the war.

Steve felt his body shiver oddly just thinking Peggy’s name. Her name, just thinking of her, really, was like pressing on a day-old bruise, reinvigorating the pain and the pressure. He couldn’t even think about it directly, or head-on - so maybe it was less of a bruise, more of a scar, more of a scab, a barely-closed wound straining its bandages, infected, pulsing - 

Well, he didn’t like to think of her much, if he could help it.

This work, Nicolas Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D., friends in high places - it was what Peggy had done. It’s what he and Peggy had done, together. It was what he was good at. 

The answer should have been easy. 

-

The next morning, for the first time since early 1945, Steve slept in. He slept until his alarm went off, then turned the alarm off and kept right on sleeping. He woke up close to noon, drenched in sweat from the sunlight streaming into his bedroom, tangled in his sheets and feeling heavy and far away from himself. 

He delayed making coffee, too. He stared at the ceiling and tried to line everything up in his head, like dominoes, balanced and in a row, poised to tip over and get back to the business of being Captain America.

Or even Steve Rogers.

He wanted, he thought, as he brewed his coffee at last, he wanted to do something - something he hadn’t done in a long time, he wanted - 

He wanted to just talk to somebody.

He wanted to talk to Bucky, or Peggy, or Gabe or Jim or Falsworth or Mom or - 

Well, really, Bucky or Peggy. Or anybody who knew Steve Rogers.

Swing by the VA sometime, Sam Wilson had told him. Sam - beautiful Sam, dazzling Sam, Sam with his dimples and dark eyes and giant dog and the instant understanding, the instant shared reality, of it’s your bed, isn’t it.

Sam Wilson was who he wanted to see right now.

By the time he’d arrived at the VA, the confidence of that first sip of coffee, much less that a shared moment over army-issue bedrolls constituted a profound mutual understanding, was waning somewhat, but he went inside anyways, feeling enormous and gawky and awkward, feeling massively out of place and stupid, but he heard voices and followed them into a large, sunny room with linoleum floors and chairs in a neat semi-circle. Sam was at the front, holding court, but listening intently to a woman who was speaking to the room.

“The thing is,” she was saying, “I feel like it’s getting worse. A cop pulled me over last week - he thought I was drunk - because I was swerving in the road. I swerved to avoid a plastic bag. I thought it was an IED.”

IEDs hadn’t looked anything like plastic bags in Steve’s day, and they weren’t called IEDs - they mostly just called them mines, even if they were handmade - but he’d encountered a fair few. Partisans and civilians used to make them to blow up German train lines. He wondered, suddenly, if any German stranger had ever swerved his car in a quiet, civilian street, in peacetime, thinking he saw an handmade Belarusian landmine.

“Some stuff you leave there,” Sam said, as if answering Steve’s wayward thought, “other stuff we’re gonna bring back. It’s our job to figure out how we’re gonna carry it. Is it gonna be in a big-ass suitcase or an itty-bitty man-purse? It’s up to you. It’s what I’m here for.”

Steve stared at the linoleum floor, artlessly striped to look like wood, and thought about what he was carrying, what kind of space it took up. It wasn’t anything itty-bitty. It felt like he was dragging a howitzer behind him, frankly, but other times like he’d just left the tank somewhere behind him and kept forgetting to go back and get it.

“That’s all for today, folks,” Sam said, glancing at his watch, “but I’ll see everyone next week, or Sunday if you’ll be at Allen Chapel then.” 

Everyone smiles and bids Sam a warm goodbye, heading out together in groups of two and threes, chatting amiably or squeezing one another’s shoulders bracingly. Steve cut through the stream of people fairly easily, his enormous body awkwardly parting the crowd. Sam was looking at his phone, but grinned widely when he saw Steve.

“Well, look who it is,” he said, warmly. “The running man.”

Steve felt his heart leap - Sam was so openly, so obviously happy to see him. He hadn’t expected that, somehow. 

“I - I caught the last few minutes. It’s - ”

Familiar. Different. Not where I belong. 

“ - intense,” he finished lamely. 

“Yeah, brother,” Sam said, nodding gamely, but his tone was earnest. “We all got the same problems. Guilt. Regret.”

That wasn’t the same as swerving to avoid an imagined IED. That wasn’t the same as it’s like sleeping on a marshmallow. That was -

That was. Guilt. Regret. Allow Barnes the dignity of his choice.

“You lose someone?” he asked Sam, before he could think better of such an intrusive question. He supposed it was a natural next stop from it’s your bed.

“My wingman, Riley,” Sam said, instantly answering the question Steve wasn’t asking. (It’s your bed, right? You can’t come back, even though you’re back. You lose someone? You’re carrying ghosts.) “Flying a night mission. Standard PJ rescue op, nothing we hadn’t done a thousand times before, till RPG knock Riley’s dumb ass out of the sky. Nothing I could do. It’s like I was up there just to watch.”

I had him on the ropes. I know you did - get down! Bucky! Hand on! Grab my hand - Bucky!

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, and hoped Sam understood how much those two words contained, how much he understood what it was like to just be up there to watch. 

“After that, I had a really - hard time finding a reason to be over there, you know?” Sam continued, and Christ, Steve did. 

Steve wondered if he could possibly respond in their strange shared language. Sleeping on a marshmallow. I was just up there to watch. What was the next line in this play?

“But you’re happy now,” he asked, “back in the world?”

As if Iraq, as if Afghanistan, as if Germany and France and Italy and London weren’t the world.

“Hey,” Sam said with a shrug, letting their conversation float back up from this awful place, “the number of people giving me orders is down to - well, pretty much zero. So that’s cool.” He pauses and frowns at Steve for a moment. “Why? You missing the life?”

Steve frowned. Was he? 

He swallowed.

“I don’t know.” 

\- 

They end up walking around the mall for a long time, with coffees they bought from a street vendor. Steve told Sam, broadly, about Natasha’s offer, without saying it was her. He told Sam, broadly, about how he spent the war - what he did besides make newsreels and radio shows, besides USO shows and stunts - and Sam listened, thoughtfully, once in a while making a little “hmm” or “yeah” or “oh?” sound, mostly letting Steve talk.

“So what I’m hearing,” said Sam, thoughtfully, after almost an hour, when the sun was going down, “is that you might be able to get back in. And you’re not sure if you want to.”

Steve nodded, feeling his throat constrict oddly at hearing it spoken so plainly. 

“Well,” said Sam, “there’s a lot to consider. Money, of course, but you mentioned your back pay. There’s the question of security - are you safe working out in the world? But you can look after yourself. You’re famous for it.”

Steve felt his ears get hot.

“It really comes down to how you want to spend your time,” Sam said.

“It’s not just that,” Steve said, trying not to sound contrary for the sake of it (even if that was, sort of, the other thing he was famous for). 

“What else is it, then?” Sam asked, sounding genuinely interested.

“Well, it’s like - am I being - am I being grateful enough, or - I guess I mean am I being, sort of, helpful enough?”

Sam looked at him for a long time. Steve felt his already-hot ears get hotter; Sam really was very handsome. 

“That’s a really noble question,” Sam said, finally, “though I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything less from Captain America.”

Steve looked away, flattered and embarrassed in equal measure. He hadn’t been trying to be noble.

“I also don’t think it matters,” Sam continued. “I don’t think one choice is necessary more helpful or grateful than another. I mean, dude, look at those kids. Look at what it means to them, to see you.”

Steve thought of the little girl who hadn’t felt a real, human hand hold hers in almost a year. He thought of the little boy who taught him about Elmo and Grover, and about the kids who were terrified of surgery who promised him - him! - they’d be brave. He thought about Jamie, so protective of his hair growing back, laughing so hard at Steve falling in his ass, making dumb faces for the other kids on the ward. 

“You’re smiling,” said Sam, and he was smiling too, widely and warmly. “So I guess this is the question. Do you want to choose Captain America, or Steve?”

-

Once again, Steve woke up to two emails. The first was from Natasha, and it told him to call her if he had any questions. I hope I wasn’t too forward, it said, and I trust you’ll make the right call. He wondered if she really trusted him. 

He stopped wondering - stopped thinking at all - when he opened the next email. 

Steve, come to the hospital as soon as you get this. Jamie’s very ill. -Sam 

Steve was out of bed and in the parking lot, fumbling onto his motorcycle, before he quite realized it. He was sloppily dressed, his heart racing. He couldn’t remember the way to the hospital, but his body seemed to. 

Jamie couldn’t die. Jamie wasn’t going to die. Jamie was probably going to die. 

He’s just a kid, Steve thought, furiously, as if that had ever changed anything. It isn’t fair, he thought, as if it were possible for such a thing to be fair. 

He found himself in the parking lot for the hospital, unsure how he’d gotten there, hands shaking hard, and he realized he didn’t even know where to go, he didn’t even know what was happening, he hadn’t even checked the time on Sam’s email, he was so stupid, for God’s sake, Jamie was probably already -

“Steve!”

He turned, and in the watery dawn light he saw Sam jogging towards him, looking anxious and drawn but - maybe Steve was imagining it - as relieved to see him as Steve felt to see Sam. 

“Hey,” he said, “hi. Thank you so much for coming.”

He reached forward and clasped Steve’s arm. Steve wished he could crush Sam in a hug. 

“It’s okay,” Sam said, and he sounded like he was holding back tears, or maybe like he’d been crying very recently. “It’s - Jamie’s kidneys are failing. They’re treating it, but - ”

“He can have mine,” Steve said, without a second thought. “I don’t even need it. It might regrow, and even if it doesn’t, it’s - ”

He stopped, because Sam was hugging him - actually, crushing him, wrapping his entire self around Steve. 

Then it was over, and Steve wondered if Sam would ever kiss him. 

Not the moment, Rogers, he thought.

“Steve, he has cancer, he can’t take a transplant,” Sam said, patting Steve’s shoulder, looking something close to overwhelmed.

“Can’t? If it’s just that the doctors don’t - ”

Sam hugged him again.

“You’re a very good person, Steve,” he said.

“I just have an extra kidney,” Steve said.

Sam actually laughed. 

-

In the end, they sat in the hospital chapel for a long time, drinking cup after cup of watery hospital coffee they took turns fetching. Sam said Jamie and his mother would have to weigh in on the issue, and Steve said he’d do whatever he could. Sam said Jamie would be fine, almost certainly, and if Steve didn’t quite believe him, he understood the feeling. Sam pulled up some definitions and statistics on his phone and they looked at them together. Sam texted someone to say he’d be at the hospital all day today. 

At almost 11 am, Steve pulled out his phone and sent a message to Natasha. 

I appreciate your offer, he said, but after some thought I’ve realized my skillset - whatever it is - is best utilized here. Hope to have lunch again soon. Steve 

“Did you just make that up off the top of your head?” Sam asked, peeking at Steve’s phone. He’d stretched his arm over the back of Steve’s chair, so they were almost tucked together. 

Steve, yet again, blushed.

Natasha’s reply came almost immediately. 

You know where to find me. :) 

Steve smiled and put the phone back in his pocket. Sam looked at him. 

“Best utilized here?” he said, sounding almost hopeful.

“Yeah,” said Steve, thinking here meant the hospital, of course, but also right here, under Sam’s arm, on his left. “Here.”

Sam closed the distance between them.


	3. Art!!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> OriginalCeenote is amazing

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/183133495@N02/48818157441/in/dateposted-public/)

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/183133495@N02/48818797978/)


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